Maya Plisetskaya monument, Moscow

I will begin this little journey by grumbling. But this time, instead of grumbling at what I’m writing about, I’ll grumble at those who have grumbled at what I’m writing about. In short I think Viktor Mitroshin’s new monument to Maya Plisetskaya on Plisetskaya Square in Moscow is wonderful. I have read all kinds of nonsense about what is wrong with this statue, located between houses 6 and 12 on Bolshaya Dmitrovka Street. It captures the great ballerina during a single, expressive moment in her famous performance of Carmen. I love that choice already. The obvious (read: cliched) choice would have been to put her in a classical tutu and picture her dancing Swan Lake or The Dying Swan. Then she would have looked like all other ballerinas on all their bronze and marble stands all over the world. But in choosing Carmen, Mitroshin emphasized not only Plisetskaya’s physical prowess, grace and beauty, he put a big exclamation point after character! Plistetskaya was a spit-fire right down to the end of her life in 2015 when she died at the age of 89. And she looks it here. This is a woman that’s going to mess with you. Whether you can handle it or not.
Maya Plisetskaya was born November 20, 1925, in Moscow. She died May 2, 2015, in Munich. She had lived in Germany most of the time since the Perestroika era. In fact, she spent several years growing up in Germany (1932-36), where her father worked, first as the head of a Soviet mining company, and then as the General Consul of the Soviet Union. He was arrested in 1937 and shot in 1938; her mother Rakhila Messerer, a silent film actress, was arrested and exiled in 1938. To keep the state from sending Maya to an orphanage for children of enemies of the state, her aunt Sulamif Messerer, a soloist at the Bolshoi Theatre, adopted Maya. The influence of a tight, artistic family would surely have exerted itself on the young girl even without this development, but now the imprint of Sulamif’s profession clearly had every reason to be felt. In fact, Maya debuted as a dancer when she was around 15 or 16. It occurred while she and her family were in the city of Sverdlovsk (Yekaterinburg today) from 1941 to 1942 during evacuation from Moscow due to the war. She joined the troupe of the Bolshoi Theater in 1943 and soon was dancing solo parts and taking on the role of prima ballerina.
Hers was an enormous, rich, eventful life, and I won’t even try to dig into that. Suffice it to say that some five years after her retirement from the Bolshoi (at age 65! – absolutely unheard of for a dancer), none less than Maurice Bejart created a show especially for her – Ave Maya – for her 70th birthday. The following year she danced The Dying Swan in St. Petersburg, Moscow and New York.

I saw Plisetskaya dance in Boston in – I believe it would have been 1987 or 1988. I was (and am) no ballet expert, but during a short stint in Washington, D.C., I frequently saw performances by Rudolf Nureyev, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Alexander Godunov and others, so I had a certain grounding for good dance. I remember sitting in the hall at the old Opera House in downtown Boston and thinking that she was doing little more than moving gracefully around the stage – but with what extraordinary grace! The main piece in which she danced that night was in a ballet adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s “The Lady with the Lapdog,” with music written especially for Plisetskaya by her husband Rodion Shchedrin. I just dug into the net and found a clip of that very performance (not the Boston performance, of course, but of Lapdog). And there she is again, “not dancing,” but performing with astonishing grace, precision and feeling. Give the video a look.
The last time I saw her dance was at a concert on Red Square. It was 1992, at the first Red Square Invites! festival where she performed The Dying Swan. Oksana and I had great seats – fourth row – because I was covering the event for The Moscow Times. Here is a video of what we saw that night. Again, I must say it – what astonishing grace, elegance and precision. This is not anywhere even close to the norm for a dancer of her age. It is virtually unprecedented. Four years later – without me in attendance – she danced that part for the last time in her career.
Several years later I wrote a play and Plisetskaya emerged immediately as an inspiration. The play begins as a mother talks to her daughter about Plisetskaya and it ends as the daughter, alone, remembers her mother talking about Plisetskaya.
Plisetskaya is in no way, shape or form to blame for the fact that I could not stop myself from pointlessly adding still one more play to the world’s endless oceans of plays, but she, for, me, was a tuning fork throughout the writing of Dancing, Not Dead. Enough of that. I allow myself that little bit not to insert myself in this story, but to indicate the power of the effect Plisetskaya had on me.
A few words on the photos and the monument. If you look closely you may see something that looks like defects in the photos – blobs or streaks of white. That is just the way a fairly heavy snowfall was captured by my camera. As for the monument itself – look at those gorgeous arms, hands, legs. Look at the sassy sway of the dress. Look at the dark, hard eyes and the tight, determined mouth. Look at the sway of the back. Look at that crazy flower on her head. Look at how all of it strains upward into the sky. I’m telling you, the whole thing is beautiful.
If I’m going to grumble a bit, I might suggest that the sculptor didn’t spend enough time thinking about the base on which his fabulous Plisetskaya dances. It’s very clunky, a big rock half-hidden by a bronze drape. I give it a minus, but I give such huge pluses to everything else it just doesn’t matter in the end. I also, as a parting comment, want to say that I love the muted colors. First of all, they don’t try to compete with the gorgeous mural that stands beside the monument (I’ll write about that another time), nor do they try to conjure up the fiery red and midnight black that were Plisetskaya’s costume in Carmen. As for Carmen, I won’t bother to link to videos. Just go to YouTube and search “Plisetskaya Carmen.” You won’t get anything done for the next hour or so.